Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the earnings call. We will start in a moment.
This meeting is being recorded.
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the earnings call of CEWE Group following the publication of the first quarter figures of 2026. I would like to welcome Chief Executive Officer Thomas Mehls and Chief Financial Officer Sirka Hintze, who will speak in a moment and guide us through the presentation and the figures. Before I hand over to the management board, please note that you have the option of switching your camera on and off by yourself. In this case, you will be visible during the entire presentation, but not on the recording. The recording will be stopped before the Q&A session. Having said this, Mr. Mehls, the stage is yours.
Thank you very, very much and a very warm welcome to all of you. Yes, we appreciate, of course, if you switch on your video. We are a photo company, Sirka, right? We're living in pictures, and video is part of that, so thanks very much for doing so. Yeah, we appreciate it very much. Welcome to this Q1 earnings call. Sirka, we have a very special earnings call.
Yes
This morning.
We, I guess we made our first quarter quite exciting.
Yes, I hope so. This is why when we look at the agenda, we start with the latest news, hot off the press, so to speak. You probably have all noticed our communication, which we pushed out yesterday, and we had to push out yesterday actually, because we concluded a deal in the Commercial Online Print. We go through the results, the corporate development, financial details, and it will be followed, as always, by a Q&A session. Let's start with what we have communicated yesterday. We are in the process of selling our Commercial Online Print business segment. We took the decision to sell it. We signed the deal yesterday, and we're in the period now to wait for the closing of that deal. What is our Commercial Online Print business segment?
That is the business segment with the brand SAXOPRINT, viaprinto and LASERLINE. These are brands which help people to print their business cards, their brochures, their flyers, their flag bags, basically promotional material in a wider range. What we do basically is either large format or a paper-based printing business there. Just let me go through a little bit of the rationale here. What does it mean? It means focus. This is the main message we want to convey here. We want to focus on our core segment, which is photo finishing. We're the leader of premium photo finishing products. With this deal, we want to focus management attention but also capital to grow organically and non-organically. We come to that one, our photo finishing business. That is the main rationale for why are we doing that.
We are increasing profitability. On a pro forma basis, looking back at the 2025 figures here, we took out the commercial online print division out of our figures, it would be roughly 1 percentage point of margin increase, which we are having here. Our return on capital employed will increase significantly by 2 percentage points on a pro forma basis in 2025. This deal gives us focus, but gives us better profitability as well. We will have a cash inflow. We will come to the metrics of the deal in a second, we will have a cash inflow. We did not sell it for EUR 1. We will have a cash inflow, how do we use that cash inflow? We wanna use it in a value-oriented manner.
The strategic priority, as pointed out in the first point, is the photo finishing business. We want to continue to invest in technology, efficiency, our brands. I mean, we're really the brand leader in photo finishing, but as you all know and you've heard from us, and we are confirming that one through selective value-enhancing acquisitions. We're not trying to do acquisitions for the sake of doing acquisitions. We want to do acquisitions that really make sense. We tend to say deep pockets, short hands. We really will focus there as well. And you can expect from us the continuation of our share buyback program and also the dividend payout, you know, and you will come to that in a second, Sirka.
We remain one of the very few leaders of constantly increasing dividends here, and this is something you can expect from us as well. Looking a little bit deeper into the transaction, whom are we selling it to? It's the company called Cimpress. Most of you would known it from the brand Vistaprint. If you're German-based, you might have heard of WIRmachenDRUCK.de, which is a website where they basically do the same business like we're doing. For them, it makes a lot of sense. It really makes a lot of sense because in Germany, they do not own a production yet, so they print at third parties mainly. I can see, I mean, at the end of the day, you have to ask them in their quarterly call.
At the end of the day, it makes a lot of sense for them because with the acquisition, they not only gain revenue, but they also gain the capabilities of a very efficient production, and they can use this production to print their own product there. It makes a lot of sense to them. This is why they take over all the 544 employees that we have in this business division. It will be taken over, and we have to say they're the global market leader. You know, we have always discussed the topic that this is a consolidating market, and so they will be able to produce more efficiently.
We can also say, well, we are quite proud that what we have built over the last decade, a little more than a decade actually, was so attractive that the world market leader actually had a high interest in acquiring this business segment. Looking into the transaction there, No, this is the Okay, sorry about this one. Let's talk about the I have a different slide here, Axel.
Yes. Yeah, I doubt it.
Okay. Let's look back a little. We have a bit of confusion, but it doesn't really matter here. Where we were coming from. If you will look back in 2009, that's a long time back. We know that. Sorry about this one. It made sense to think about something like commercial online print. What was the situation we were in? We were not able to grow the photo finishing business at that point in time. We had capacity in digital print. That was the start in 2009. We want to leverage also the brand that we had built for the commercial online print. You all might remember that we tried with cewe-print.de. These were moves we made there.
It seemed appropriate, let's put it that way, to establish commercial online print as a new business unit. You know that, what we did in the photo finishing, we really grew that business through acquisition organically, through regional expansion. We really grew that business, and we didn't grow the commercial online print to a, let's say, balancing second leg that you would stand on. What we are in right now is a business with a consumer-oriented photo finishing. We have double-digit margins in the consumer-oriented photo finishing. It's our growth driver, but it's also our margin driver very clearly. The commercial online print is just clearly a very different business. It's a price-driven segment. It's B2B oriented. We cannot leverage our brand.
We cannot leverage our B2C capabilities as much as we hoped for, let's put it that way. We also, you know, were in front of this decision to say, "Okay, do we invest more into that?" Because scale matters really in the commercial online print, and this is the decision we took. We said, "No, we focus on photo finishing." We don't wanna dilute this because scaling in commercial online print would have meant a significant investment, and it would not had allowed us to significantly invest into photo finishing. It was a really, you know, it was like a turning point for us, and we took a really strategic decision here. Now, sorry about this one, coming to the transaction details.
Obviously, we did sign yesterday, but the closing is depending to the typical conditions, mainly antitrust approvals. We expect it to take place during the second half of the year 2026. You might ask us, "Okay, how much did you get at the end?" We have agreed not to disclose that price, but we can tell you we managed to sell it for a higher price than our book values. You see that in the last bullet here. We expect to generate a gain from the sale of this business segment in the mid double-digit million euro range. It's a bit complicated there. Let's put it this way, quite frank, it was a good deal. It was really a good deal.
We managed to really get back and a significant portion more than what we had in the, in the books. We will receive a cash inflow. I refer to that as well. Just for you to remember what was the turnover, it was close to EUR 90 million with an EBITDA of EUR 8.9 million, an EBIT of EUR 1.7 million, and EBT of EUR 0.9 million. That was, that's basically what we are going to divest. What can you expect in our figures? Now or yesterday, let's put it that way, with the signing, we will separate the commercial online print from our consolidated income statement. IFRS is telling us to do so.
We continue to report the segment with a COP segment and group totals with and without commercial online print. You can expect us to do so. We need to do it. We expect closing a set in the second half of 2026. We will deconsolidate deconsolidate is an interesting word. Deconsolidate the commercial online print, and of course, with a recognition of the gain of disposal, and we will also adjust our segment reporting accordingly. This is something you can expect from us. Just for you to get a sense of what's happening with the group, and we did this based on, of course, the full year and the only full year we're having is the year 2025. We did this on a pro forma.
It's really pro forma display here with a consolidated financial statement from 2025 or turnover, obviously, because we are selling a whole business segment here, will decrease to EUR 777.0. That's an interesting figure. It's not a Boeing jet here. It would be the turnover figure from last year. The EBIT would decrease slightly as well. Profitability, as mentioned, would go up by 1 percentage point, and our ROCE, as mentioned, would go up by 2 percentage points without the commercial online print. Our target ranges, obviously, we had to adjust as well for 2026. The revenue that we project now is between EUR 780 million and EUR 810 million, and the EBIT between EUR 85 million and EUR 91 million.
Here you can see it on a long-term range again. You can see the famous chart. We still call it internally the Olaf chart, just in accordance with our old Chief Financial Officer who invented this chart. We see the long-term growth paths to be continued into 2026, and the story remains very intact and very solid and even more compelling without the commercial online print segment here. Here you can see what we have just mentioned, the group EBIT without commercial online print. This is the new target range, EUR 85 million-EUR 91 million. This is something which we will expect for the year 2026. Here you can see our new targets, and which is very important.
You can see the commercial online print had nothing to do with the photos, had nothing to do with the CEWE PHOTOBOOK there. You can see the previous year figures on the left-hand side, previous year 2025, including commercial online print, the old target including commercial online print, then the pro forma figures of the year 2025 without the commercial online print and the new targets. We talked about revenue and EBIT already. I just stressed the fact that it doesn't change anything in terms of photos. It doesn't change anything in terms of CEWE PHOTOBOOK. The EBIT effect here, you can see this is very important to know, is EUR 85 - EUR 91.
The EBT here, and this is without the earning of tax, is without the one-time effect, and we will come to this one, which we were expecting from the commercial online print, right? This is the target without commercial online print, but we have a nice chart which will illustrate what's happening with the earnings after tax and what's happening with the earnings per share. I think this is about to follow. Yes. Here you can see our earnings after tax, the new range which we're going to expect from the business segments to be continued, so from EUR 58 - EUR 57 - EUR 62.
We will have an earnings after tax resulting from the sale of the discontinued segment of Commercial Online Print, which is actually quite significant. We are not going to comment in detail on that, but just by the size of the box we were trying here to illustrate, you can probably deduct a little bit of what to expect here, and the same is true for the earnings per share, obviously. Now let's come to this one, and this is again just confirming the strategic rationale of this transaction. The strategic positioning of the CEWE Group is 100% focused on photo finishing. We will really entirely focus the whole group on photo finishing with clear objectives. They have not changed by this transaction. Not at all.
We will be able to give it more focus, and focus means management attention, but means also capital allocation here. We want to scale across production, logistics, and IT. Scaling is very important. We discussed that. We have a premium brand strategy. We are quite successful with the premium brand strategy. It allows us to generate a lot higher margin than other, let's say, printers, and we would love to call them printers just to make the difference. We will continue to invest in innovation. We will continue to invest in technology. We will use this investment to automate more, to standardize more, and to gain more speed. We think this is a really important USP of our brands here. We will also continue to look at acquisitions like we did before.
I mean, basically all the brands which you see are Pixum, WhiteWall, DeinDesign, Cheerz have been acquired in the past, well, 18 years. In the past 18 years, we will continue to do so. We will continue to look for acquisitions which make a lot of sense to us. You know that the segment is not too big, we have to be very selective here. You know also that we do not have like an M&A department consisting of dozens of people. We need to make very smart choices on whom to acquire and how to acquire and when to acquire. You can expect that we are on it, this should result everything together in the continuation of a growth momentum, definitely we will look after our margins.
This being said, these are the news hot off the press from yesterday. I wanted to elaborate a little bit further on this one, and I probably would expect the Q&A session rather is circling around this question here. And you can imagine it's really important. It's probably the most important change in strategy since we started that segment here. Let's come to Q1, and you know Q1 is, you know, it's the first quarter. Oh, that was a military plane just above us. I don't know if you heard that. Sorry about this one. Let's come to the results of the first quarter in a nutshell.
As always, we want to inform you about a couple of developments which are very important as well. Group turnover grew by 1.4% or EUR 2.4 million. The Group EBIT reached EUR 5.6 million as planned. There are a couple of reasons behind that, and Sirka will come to it in more detail. One is a change we made to our DeinDesign division. We went into a slight change of business model. I will explain that on a chart later, which is about EUR 300,000 in the first quarter. Also we were able to basically swallow, and this will be almost the last quarter where we can see this effect in this magnitude, our new tariff union contract.
Actually we're comparing, let's say a new cost level here on our personal cost with a quarter which did not have the same cost level here. This is why we're saying we are quite in line with what we're seeing here. This is why we're also saying, we're confirming our targets for 2026 on the revenue as well as on the EBIT. In photo finishing, and as always, we're quite proud. You know, innovation is a key driver in this segment. If we want to continue with our premium brands, we need innovation. We need distinctions to other market player. We need distinction to just the usual CEWE PHOTOBOOK, and this is something which we are pursuing. You know this product already, but what you don't know is that we received an award for it. That's the Memento Pocket.
We were surprised. I think I commented that already in one of the calls. We were surprised actually by the success of that. It's just a pocket at the end of the day in a CEWE PHOTOBOOK where you can put on remembrance, like, I don't know, like a menu card from your wedding, for example, or boarding pass from your travel or something like this. Very simple. Good margin, because it's just something which basically we glue into the CEWE PHOTOBOOK at the end of the CEWE PHOTOBOOK. Does create a lot of value for our consumers, and they love it. We also did receive an award. You always think you can't innovate on the calendar segment, but you can.
It looks more like a wall art, and it's a size which is astonishing. It's really a wall art. If you put that up to your wall, I would say the calendar kind of goes into the background, the calendar function. It's more the picture there, and it's one of the largest calendars you can order in the market. Very interestingly here, you know that we are pursuing an omni-channel strategy. You know that our retail partners really are at the core of what we're doing, you see in the background a CEWE Photostation, which is usually placed in drugstores or grocery stores and where people go to print. The question is, how do you transmit your photos, right?
There's the cable, very traditional, but it works quite well, right? Sometimes you have to stand in line. I don't know if you've ever managed to look just before Christmas into one of these stores. People really stand in line, and they connect their smartphones, select their pictures and so on. Some of them, especially when standing in line, have some privacy issues, say, "Okay, is somebody looking over my shoulders?" What we did here is, we built an app, CEWE Online Direct, we called it, 2.0, where you can, with a QR code, very simply just transmit your photos to the CEWE Photostation. Very easily you can prepare everything while sitting in the bus or standing somewhere else and so on.
It does allow us-- and that's also very important, it does allow us also to get access to the apps of our retail partners. You know that the dm app, you just, you know, dm is a large German drugstore chain, is very, very popular. Millions of downloads, used by millions of people because their customer loyalty program is based on that one, even payment functions are built in there. We can basically put a photo function into their app. Very smart, very nice. Also this seems to be like an IT kind of thing here, like Shopify Lab Connection. Sounds very IT-ish. It is, but it's-- in what it does, it's not. You know, we know that marketing of product has changed a lot over time.
You see that in the music industry, for example, where you can see artists that don't use a label anymore. They use a platform like YouTube, for example, or just Instagram or TikTok to become famous. The same is true for photographers. In former times, photographers, if you're a professional photographer and wanted to sell your photos, you needed a gallery, right? Gallery really to at the end of the day, as an intermediate, to sell your pictures. A lot of photographers don't use a gallery anymore. They market their pictures via Instagram. They have a web shop in order to sell their pictures. What do you sell? You know, NFT really did not come through that much, so you actually sell printed pictures, right? Printed photos. How do you do that as a photographer? What are you doing?
Are you ordering that at, let's say, WhiteWall or CEWE, you put it into your garage, if somebody calls you up, then you send it out to the U.S., to Japan, to Europe? How do you handle logistics? How do you handle customs and all of that? That's something we can do. What we built is an app that can integrate in Shopify. Shopify is one of the most used technology platform for photographers to build their web shops with, it just plugs in, they can define, okay, I have this picture. I have an edition of 10 or 50 or 100. I wanna sell it in this size. I wanna sell it with this frame, we handle the rest. We handle logistics. We print it on demand.
There's no risk for them, and so on and so on. It's branded. It's quite neat. We see a lot of future for this one in our relationship with our photographers. Yeah, I did not mention that we got a TIPA award for it. We got a TIPA award for it, as we did for all the others. Last but certainly not least, I commented on that one because it's a little bit the reason for not reaching the previous year EBIT figures here, because we did invest a little bit into the change of DeinDesign. You know, DeinDesign is our specialist for smartphone cases, and you see them here. In the past, we concentrated on the value of the photo on a case, right?
Sounds logical to you, right? Or a design on a case or something like this. We saw the market changing quite significantly, and we saw that the value is not only by the case, by the picture on the case, but also by the case itself. This is a little bit different to what you see maybe on paper. Like, you know, if we print something on a paper, and we create a CEWE PHOTOBOOK from it, then the paper already gets a totally different value. This is not so much the case for smartphone cases, because the primary target is you want a smartphone case to protect your smartphone. We said, well, the quality of what we had in smartphone cases was good, but it was not outstanding.
People said, "Okay, it's nice that I can print a Disney design on it or that I can print a photo on it." That is quite good. The smartphone case you're using for it, I can actually get for EUR 7 at Amazon or EUR 5 at Shein, so on. We said we need an own range of cases which are really outstanding, which at the end of the day, support our premium-ness of our brand strategy here. You can see that range. We also, in addition to sell that printed with a photo, we also say, "Okay, this is a good range we can also sell without pictures." This is an investment we did. This is why we needed a different name. It's NIVOCASE by DeinDesign.
I invite you all to go to this website, look at it. Really great product. We don't have a smartphone here, but I can assure you, very, very, very nice and premium product. Together with the nice picture. This was my elaboration of what had happened in the past months, and I hand over to Sirka to let her tell what that meant in figures.
Thank you very much, Thomas. Let's get back to numbers. Let's start again with the photofinishing, which is our core of the business. If you look into what happened with our turnover, you can see that there's a moderate growth. The moderate growth means here we have a turnover increase by 1.7%. If we anticipate what's going on in the different economies, I guess for even for first quarter, we can be quite satisfied with it. Especially also because we again follow the trend that we have a volume growth and this is always good, and we will also later see what products drive this development.
If you look into the EBIT, you can see that, and Thomas mentioned it already, that the EBIT mainly contributed from the photofinishing here for the group EBIT. EUR 5.1 million coming out of the photofinishing, which is compared to the last year's first quarter, EUR 500,000 less, and this is by EUR 300,000 driven by the adjustments into the business model of DeinDesign. We redeveloped the webshop. We invested and of course the business, while this transition is happening, we've seen, of course, less turnover, less results, of course, and this is also our investment into the new business model of the DeinDesign. The new book is a core product and, we will monitor and watch the developments in the next months quite closely.
Also we have one of our board members acting also as a managing director for that business. We are very close watching the developments here. All in all, we would say a successful start to the year. We also see a continuous increase of our cost basis, personnel costs plus marketing costs, especially also to support our turnover in the international markets. This is here reflected in the EBIT. If we would extract the special effect of DeinDesign, we would see a comparable situation compared to last year. If you have a specific view on the turnover development of the quarters, you can see that traditionally, the first quarter is the second or nearly the third best of the year.
We are still having a bit the flow of the last season, and we can see that we ended up within the range, within our expectation for the first quarter. Also in terms of EBIT, we are in the expected range of the quarter. If you look into the number of prints, I mentioned it earlier. There is a good development of the total prints in millions. A continuing growth, and also the value per photo is growing, and that's ending up in a turnover of the photofinishing, which is positive, our core product, the CEWE PHOTOBOOK.
We can see that the volume continues to grow in the first quarter by 2.2% and also due to a lot of new features, a lot of new product addings, like the pocket at the back or the other premiumization standards like different paper quality, different covers. This is feeding again also the turnover of our core product. Please have a look. It's really great also with the new covers and then also the new colors of the covers. It's really great. Commercial Online Printing. We start repeating a bit what is containing to our Commercial Online Printing segment. It's with set up with three brands.
We have the WIRmachenDRUCK, SAXOPRINT, and LASERLINE. It's still on board, of course, so that we are also having a look into the performance, which is not too bad. Especially if you anticipate the market development. The market is still under pressure, so we have a high competitive environment. Also, of course, it's like if you have a commodity product, it's following also the, the trend here that the price is the, the driver. This is what you can see here also in the results, slightly shrinking. Turnover-wise, not too bad, especially if you see how the market is developing. The retail segment is. Also, I'm repeating a bit what we also presented last time.
We have 101 stationary photo retail stores, especially in Scandinavia and Central Eastern Europe. E-commerce workshops, which sell us hardware like cameras and accessories and photo products like frames and stuff like that, decorating the photos, integrating into the rooms at home. What we can see here is a slightly a decrease of the overall turnover by 3.7%. The EBIT is slightly rising. I mean it's all in all a low contribution with small amounts. Also we can see that the hardware retail, which is really related to these hardware products is growing. The trend is obviously not really shrinking.
The other segment is not really adding something to our business, but it's part of the reporting and I have nothing to add on that. That leads me to the financial details. It's here in a consolidated P&L statement for the first quarter. We have an addition of nearly EUR 2.5 million more revenues, mainly driven or contributed by the photo finishing. As I also mentioned, the result is affected by higher marketing expenses, higher shipping and logistic costs, and higher IT license costs. Also what we can see is that the expenses for the materials are rising, so it's a mixture of different effects.
That means that our EBIT is lower than the last quarter in 2025. If we look into the balance sheet, you can see, or you probably have noticed that the balance sheet is growing. We have now an equity ratio of 70.8%, which is quite high. This is mainly because we invested into two buildings and we added a renovation of our local facility here. We invested into a production place of our WhiteWall business in Frechen, but also we bought a new building in the U.K. and which are our last two bigger investments into our production facilities.
This is of course increasing our asset base, but also we invested into photo paper, mostly into the photo paper for the photo finishing business, but also for, still for the commercial online printing. If you look into our free cash flow, you can see here, of course, what happened with our investments. You can see here, especially the cash flow shrinking from the investment activities by EUR 25 million. Also the operational cash flow, the free cash flow, sorry, is shrinking. If you look into the operating activities, this is more from, driven from an offset of the working capital. The significant changes towards the last quarter of 2025 is really the investment activity.
This is really the investment into the production plans. That also means for us that all our production plans are now in our hands. This is it for the moment. We follow our strategy to be the driver of what we are doing with the properties, but this does not mean that we invest into further property production plans because we have them now all in our hands. The ROCE also here is reflecting the result situation 17.4% still strong. You know, the dilution which was here by the Commercial Online Printing is going away by selling the business segment.
The seventh time in a row, we are proposed to the supervisory board of trustees, but also for the next step for the shareholders meeting, we propose EUR 3, which is again EUR 0.15 higher than last year, and anticipates also a bit the or reflecting a bit the less result situation of the year 2025. We are curious for the shareholders meeting taking place beginning of June to get an approval. We would like to follow our, I would say also reputation as being the top dividend increaser at in this index or stock exchange here with the second place. For us, it's not only driving so the numbers, it's what makes us happy.
It's our customers and happy customers is our key and core element of managing and driving the company.
Thank you very much.
The recording has stopped
The recording of this call is stopped, and this is a live session only now we are among ourselves. Thank you very much for your presentation, the insights on your focus decision and the Q1 figures. For our dynamic conversations, ladies and gentlemen, we kindly ask you to ask questions in person via audio line with the Raise Your Hand button. If you would like to turn your camera on too, please feel invited to do so. If you are dialing in via phone, you can use the key combination star nine followed by star six. Please note that questions via chat box cannot be submitted today. We have the first hand up via Mr. Bosse. You can unmute yourself now.
Yeah, I'm unmuted. Yeah. Hello, Volker Bosse, Baader Bank. Thanks for taking my question, and congratulations on the divestment deal. I think it's strategically the right decision. Of course, as you already indicated, Mr. Mehls, it's all of my questions are circling around the topic. You said you are looking for value-enhancing acquisitions, so I would be interested to get more granularity. Do you have already a shortlist of potential targets or are you even already in negotiation? You said, "We are on it." What does that mean? Of course, in that context, what criteria for a potential target you are looking? What are potential valuation multiples which could be attractive for you?
All in all, what is the financial headroom which you are willing to use for a potential acquisition? That is the topic around how to use the proceeds from the divestment. Second part of my or second question would be on current trading. I mean, we are already now in April, have seen April and are in May, and given the current macro environment, do you fear that consumers will do less long-haul vacations in summer, which means then less photos and consequently also less or smaller photo books for you later on? Just your thoughts on the current environment and how to deal with these things around us. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you very much, Mr. Bosse, for your question. I can fully understand your let's say wish to dig a little bit deeper into our acquisition strategy. Just let me frame that a little bit. It's a very small market. Our main target is that we get the targets that we want, that we get it at the right price, and that we don't You know, we are also maybe a bit concerned that yesterday's news might rise prices or expectations for prices in the market. This is why we are a bit careful on the communication on that one. You asked a couple of specific questions. We are on it. What does that mean?
Number one, we regularly for the past years are looking at the market developments and are talking to many market participants. The industry is quite small, but we did enhance this activity a lot by far over the past 12 months. We were a lot more active going out there, talking to people. Look, I mean, you know, if you know a couple of our competitors, many of them are in the hand of private equity. They have investment horizons. We know broadly, you know, in which phase of their investments they're in. You can anticipate a little bit their timing and their horizon, and we wanted to make clear that we have this strategy going forward.
The main purpose of that was a little bit to evaluate, you know, where are they on their, let's say, investment horizon. What's their expectation? What's their strategy? In order for us to prioritize, this is the main topic. We needed to prioritize potential acquisitions. We wanted to get away from, let's say, opportunistic things. Also, market conditions actually helped us in this respect a lot because it goes rather to a buyer's market and we came from a seller's market, let's say, five years ago, and now it's rather buyer's market we feel. We felt, you know, we kind of put them in a list into a line of, you know, what's priority number one, what's priority number two.
Yeah
That one. That brings me to your question of the criteria there. Number one, this is maybe even in together with your third part of your question. We are rather looking for significant acquisitions because we knew from the past even smaller ones, let's say, less than EUR 10 million of revenue just to phrase here something, made almost the same amount of work in our M&A department, in our PMI, in our IT, in our whatsoever than larger ones. We said, well, if we wanna do a step now, we are rather looking into more significant ones and not adjacent small ones, small startups, which will cost us a lot of integration work, right? Let's say magnitude is one of the criteria.
If we look at what kind of business are we looking for, definitely we're not looking for printing business, right? We are looking for a premium brand business, somebody who built a brand and which could give us, this is a very important criteria, geographically more strength. We are the market leader in Europe, we are not the market leader in every single market. We have the clear aim, especially now after the divestment, become the market leader also in every single market in Europe. This is rather a very long-term view, a very long-term strategy here, 'cause, you know, sometimes we have one dominant market player and, you know, we just take our time. We take our time to grow our own brands there. We did so.
I mean, if you look at Austria or Switzerland, we came basically from nowhere. And now after 10 years of really investing into these markets, building the brands there, we have a significant market position in these countries. We can achieve something by organic ones, but not in every single country. We are looking really for something which gives us regional strength. We are looking for premium brands. We are looking for something which gives us, hopefully, also technology advantage. These are things that are on our list. In terms of headroom, I mean, you can have a look at the balance sheet.
I would say that there's almost no deal which we could not do just because we don't have the financial headroom to do so. There are a couple, but let's say almost no deal. They're number one. Number two, we wanna create value. We wanna create value and we feel prices that are achievable are rather attractive right now. Does that mean we can create value from day number one, meaning that we can increase our profitability from day one? I'm not so sure. This depends really a lot on the deal. On the long term, we wanna create value. That means we wanna drive our profitability up. We wanna scale. We wanna increase our return on capital employed.
That's the long-term strategy, and we're definitely looking at assets which can contribute to that strategy. Sorry, it was a long answer. But I can't go into more details, Mr. Bosse. I beg you for your understanding. Current trading is good, but it's not overly strong, I have to tell you. It's good, but it's not overly strong. Yes, we are looking with cautious on that one. The good thing is that we are not impacted now and immediately by the, let's call them discussions which are going on here. We had the discussion in the board about the Germans being overly pessimistic.
There was the, a friend of a board member of ours, who is very active in the airline industry and went around Europe and said, "Okay, the situation in all the countries is the same, but the most pessimistic ones are the Germans." I think that's a little bit in our interest. We are not influenced as of now, but by these discussions. Still we are cautious. Yes, we are cautious. We seek to How to say that? Like, you know, we have a couple of higher logistic costs now, good contracts, but there's a, you know, if the diesel price rises, our logistic cost rises, we are working on, giving them to our consumers, which is quite accepted and so on.
We're cautious on expense, number one, and we are still optimistic on sales, number two.
Thank you very much. All the best.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Bosse. We will move on to Ingo Schmidt. The stage is yours.
Yeah. Good morning. This is Ingo from Montega. Thank you for the presentation. It's impressive to see that you started the year with such a major strategic decision to sharpen the Group's profile. Regarding the investment, I have just one question on profitability. The Group margin increases significantly after this deal. How much of this new profitability can you keep in the long run? Do you see more potential to increase margins now that you are fully focused on the premium photo business? Thanks.
Just very, very clearly, of course, we are looking at things like how much are the synergies between the two businesses, right? This is basically what you're referring to. Are we losing synergies? There are a couple, but not many. The answer is, we clearly aim to keep up this margin improvement very clearly. That's the clear goal there. We see very limited downward risk by, let's say, losing synergies. There's a couple of things we buy together, but it's rather minor. I mean, this was at the end of the day one of the strategic rationales of why the divestment made sense.
You know, if now by all of a sudden, let's say, all of our prices for material would go up, then we would say, "Oh, maybe we shouldn't have divested it." It's just not the case. We don't see that this is just a one-time effect, number one. Everything, we have the clear goal, I mean, this is the premium brand strategy we are in. We have the clear goal to drive margins up. We see scale being of importance for us, leveraging the scale of the group better, leveraging potential acquisitions in terms of scale better. I mean, this is part of the answer I gave to Mr. Bosse a couple of seconds ago.
We're looking for acquisitions which give us scale, which use the technology, and this is why we are aiming for higher margins.
Okay. Perfect. Thank you, and all the best for the rest of the year.
Thank you very much, Mr. Schmidt, for your questions. Ladies and gentlemen, there is no hand up in this moment. I will hold the room in case somebody might have a question. Yes. Please introduce yourself with your name. I can only see your initials.
Hello. Can you hear me?
Yes. Yes, we can hear you.
Sorry, I did not find the hands up button. Just one question. First, congratulations on this deal. I think this is a really a large step now for you, and one that we waited on for a long time. If I calculate it correctly, I mean, you say that you increase your margins by 2 percentage points. You can do the calculation how much that reduces return on invested capital. That's probably around EUR 60 million or so, together with a gain of mid double digits. You must have raised some EUR 100 million in cash from this deal, so I think that's certainly a good base for steps.
Now my question, artificial intelligence, is this a threat for you, or rather a benefit? I could see a couple of beneficial impacts.
Maybe you can talk about this, how you address this topic, and what kind of the, you know, the timeline of use cases could be for you.
First you?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes. I can tell you that artificial intelligence is for us really a topic with a lot of different perspectives. First of all, I can tell you that this is already there. We are using it on the one hand for our customers to reaching them by using the assistant to create the photo books, to be more efficient, to have less time to produce your photo book, for example. Also, if you would look into our production plans, also there we have a lot of automation. We have a lot already in the software, helping us with automate the processes. There's also artificial intelligence included.
In addition to that, we have started different initiatives also to use this for creating more efficiency in administrational processes within the group on all the different ends. For us, it's not one, just one headline. It's really integrated in a lot of different aspects.
Yes, fully correct. Just let me add, because it's true. We started with artificial intelligence in our platforms a lot long, or a lot before the large language models came out. You know, has nothing more a perfect fit for artificial intelligence than pictures, right? Like, picture sorting, face recognition, all of these things we did already start before the rise of the large language models. I fully agree. It's embedded in a lot of things. We clearly see it. It's not, I tend, I'm not sure if I should be black or white, but I just go for the white now only as a chance.
We don't see a lot of threats here for our business model through artificial intelligence, because the pictures people take is about real memories. Yes, you can create pictures or images, not photos, but you can create images by artificial intelligence. It's maybe a stupid answer, but if we compare that to the times where we included databases in our platforms, where you could, for example, just draw or just take a picture of the perfect picture from the Eiffel Tower because you have missed it, because it was in the clouds when you traveled to Paris, we saw nobody wanted that. They wanted the imperfect picture of the Eiffel Tower when they were there.
We don't see that, let's say in the very start, this artificial intelligence imposes a threat that people are not taking pictures, that people don't want to preserve their memories. Looking at the competition of what they have, and of course that is a race, we're looking at them. We feel very confident that we're at least a little bit ahead of that race in what's embedded in our application. Big opportunity answer to your question, and not so much a threat answer.
Does that answer your question?
Yes. Thank you very much.
Okay. Thank you, Mr. Schultz. Are there some more questions in the pipeline, ladies and gentlemen? That doesn't seem to be the case, and we therefore come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you very much for your interest in the CEWE Group, and it's always nice also to see some of you with your camera on. Thank you for that. A big thank you also to the management board for your presentation and your time. If you should have some further questions at a later date, please feel free to contact Vice President Investor Relations, Axel Weber. I wish you all a successful day.
Sitting here.
Yes. Handing over to you, Mr. Mehls, for your closing remarks.
Yes, Sure, I think we are sitting here quite confident. I think that's important after this news of today. We've put in a lot of work.
Yes
What we have announced yesterday. We are sitting here quite confident that we took, A, the right decision, B, that we found the right buyer, and C, that at the end of the day, the economics of the deal are quite beneficial to us. Some of you put some questions or some numbers around it. We're not commenting them. At the end of the day, we are quite confident that this was very beneficial. I thank you for your interest. I thank you also very much for your patience. Some of you have asked for that step to be taken some time ago already. You know us, we're a mid-sized company. We don't like pressure ourselves, but we have a clear focus on how we want to steer that business. Yesterday's news has confirmed this focus.
Thank you very much for your interest.
Thank you very much. I have nothing to add, honestly. I was sitting in front of a lot of investors during the last months, and ask all the time for patience, and thank you for that as well. I'm also very proud on our organization that we did the transaction in that way.